It’s a good thing James gets up to put the book of lettering away. Shelby’s not sure what she might have done if the spell hadn’t been broken. She wants to stop her attraction to him before she does something she’ll regret.
“I had a brother who died when I was ten,” he tells her when he comes back. “Meningitis. The doctor said it was just a cold and he would be fine but he wasn’t. He died in the middle of the night, in the room we shared. I was there with him, in the next bed. We’d both gone swimming. We’d snuck away and biked all the way to Northport. Then he died and I didn’t. I shouldn’t have been saved. So I knew what you were going to feel. That’s why I stayed with you until the cops came. As it turned out, I happened to have some drugs in my possession, so I didn’t get to visit you in the hospital. The best I could do were the postcards.”
“They were good postcards,” Shelby says.
“Yeah?”
“Sometimes I thought you were the only one who knew I was alive.”
James reaches for his wallet. Inside there is a small black butterfly. The charm from her bracelet, broken that night. “I’ve been keeping this for you.”
Shelby takes it in her hands. Perhaps her luck has been returned to her at last. James leans in to rub on some alcohol. He runs one finger along her skin, and she shivers involuntarily. “I assume the name you want is Ben,” he says.
She shakes her head. “Helene.”
James stops, rattled. “You expect me to be a party to that kind of remorse and self-hatred?”
“You still feel bad about hitting Ben with rubber bands. I might as well have murdered Helene. At the very least I need to remember.”
“Do you think you’re the only one who’s ever done something terrible? I assaulted people and robbed them. I did these things on purpose. It wasn’t an accident like what happened to you with Helene. Anyone could have crashed that night. In AA it took me three weeks to get through the list of people I had to make amends to. But I couldn’t call my brother. I couldn’t make amends to him.”
One of the other guys in the shop moves the curtain aside and starts to come into the room.
“Get out,” James growls at him.
The guy slinks away.
“I’m not sure whose idea it was to go swimming on that day,” James says, “but I’m pretty sure it was mine.”
It’s then Shelby realizes the printed Lee marking his forearm isn’t the name of a girlfriend or a lost love. It’s his brother. She vaguely recalls him. He was a year older, wild, always in trouble. “I remember. He shot off fireworks in the gym.”
“It doesn’t help to carry them around, Shelby. That’s something I know for sure. It helps to let them go.”
But Shelby is the customer and she sticks with her choice. Before James begins to work, he tells her to breathe evenly and deeply. He’ll do his best not to hurt her. “The first one’s the worst,” he says. Shelby turns her face away, but she tears up at the first stab of pain. She can’t believe she’s crying in front of him again. This time she can’t stop. “It’s okay if you cry. Just don’t move,” he tells her. On the night of the accident she did exactly as he said. She stayed alive on the road. Her skin burns, the way it did then, and by the time James is done Shelby has stopped crying. He deftly drapes the fresh ink with surgery cloth dipped in lidocaine, which he tapes to her skin. Then he gives her some tablets of Vicodin from his own stash. “To use sparingly,” he warns. She’s to leave the bandage on for several hours and not shower.
“I hope you’re happy with it,” he says. When Shelby takes out her wallet at the counter, he won’t let her pay. “No. Not this time. It’s on the house.”
“I’m glad you shot those rubber bands at Ben,” Shelby confides when he walks her to the door. “He deserved it. You don’t have to feel bad about it anymore.”
“Just to be totally truthful, when I found you that night, you tried to get away from me. But then I told you, you could trust me.”
Shelby has no memory of this. “Really? And did I?”
James laughs at her, and there’s the glimmer of who he was before his life came to grief. “I don’t know, Shelby. You tell me.”
The snow is melting and Ben’s wedding most likely wasn’t ruined after all. When Shelby reaches her apartment she hears voices inside. Maravelle has a key for emergencies, and there she is with Jasmine, making themselves at home.
“Where have you been? We’ve been calling and calling. Don’t you ever answer your phone?” Maravelle hugs Shelby before she can take off her raincoat.
Shelby grimaces and pulls away. The tattoo is killing her. There’s an itch under her skin, and she can tell it’s only going to get worse.
“What did you do to yourself?” Maravelle asks.
Shelby slips off her coat and pulls down her shirt to expose the bandage.
“You idiot!” Maravelle says. “How is that going to look when you’re eighty?”
“I’m trying to be in the here and now,” Shelby responds.
Jasmine chimes in. “I want a tattoo!”
“Not on your life.” Maravelle throws Shelby a warning look. “You see how you influence her?”